Neotel have tentatively indicated that they intend undertaking scheduled maintenance between midnight and 6AM this coming Sunday (16 May). During this time you can expect Internet access to be intermittent or unavailable. You will likely experience this outage as an ERR_DNS_FAIL or ERR_CONNECT_FAIL error when trying to access websites. When accessing secure (https://) web sites, your browser may report that the connection has timed out or the site is unreachable.
This outage, which is taking place during a formal maintenance window, is to allow Neotel to re-route our connection from their point of presence in Belleville (Cape Town) to their POP in North End (Port Elizabeth). Given that the vast majority of Neotel-related outages we've experienced have been as a result of the stretch of fibre along the garden route between Humansdorp and Mossell Bay, we view this as a very positive development that is likely to improve the stability of our Internet access. We're informed that Neotel's POP in Port Elizabeth has redundant routes to the rest of the country via Cape Town, Durban, and Bloemfontein. We will be left with ~150km (rather than ~900km) of unprotected access circuit between Grahamstown and Port Elizabeth.
Neotel have not yet given us final confirmation that this outage will take place as scheduled. As soon as we receive the formal change notification, we'll post that confirmation here.
You are strongly encouraged to plan around this scheduled outage and assume that Internet access will be unavailable for the entire duration of the maintenance window.